How to Research Bioethics Literature  
The following guide is designed for writers working on bioethics-related stories. The guide is designed to provide an overview of available resources to research the field's academic literature, and is not meant to be comprehensive.
 
PubMed

PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes more than 16 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles dating back to the 1950s. PubMed includes links to full text articles and other related resources. The main PubMed query page is located at http://www.pubmed.gov.  The U.S. National Library of Medicine provides an excellent tutorial of PubMed features such as:

  • tips for searching with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
  • how to configure PubMed to provide automatic updates (via e-mail or RSS feed) for searches that you run frequently
  • hints for refining and limiting your searches to provide useful results quickly
The tutorial can be accessed here: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/pubmed_tutorial/m1001.html
 
QUICK TIP: To limit your search to articles that address ethics issues, add "AND bioethics[sb]" to your PubMed query. For example, a search for information on phase I clinical trials would look like this: phase I clinical trials AND bioethics[sb]. This type of query is equivalent to searching what was once known as the BIOETHICSLINE database.  
 
If you are affiliated with Johns Hopkins, the following link provides direct links to journal articles held by the Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?holding=jhumlib

Searching in Other Databases:

PubMed provides excellent coverage of biology and medicine, including all of the major bioethics journals.  Sometimes, however, you may wish to broaden your search or narrow it to a particular discipline. The following is a partial list of databases which may be useful (note that, unlike PubMed, many of these are not free databases, and will be inaccessible unless you have a personal or institutional subscription):

 
General Coverage:

Philosophy & Ethics

Nursing & Related Health Disciplines:

Law & Business:

Psychology:

Popular Press:

Searching in Specific Journals:

The following is a (partial) list of journals that focus on or frequently publish articles in bioethics. Most journals require a personal or institutional subscription to access full-text articles.  

For a more comprehensive listing of journals in other areas (biology, medicine, public health, etc.), consult the Welch Medical Library's website: http://www.welch.jhu.edu/eresources/eresources_subject.cfm 

 

 
  
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